Comments on: Red Hat's Project Spacewalk could make it the hub in the open-source wheel

Red Hat's Project Spacewalk is notable for its promise, but also for its lack of evangelism to live up to that promise.

[Philips]

It's as good as useless if it supports only RH systems.

Outside of VM support, people were doing the same with Debian (w/o UIs) for decade now. RH was always behind because their software management system (RPM) was always deficient and biased to corporate needs of RH itself rather than its customers.

[lordmorgul]

RPM is not deficient, the method of distributing a mirrored package database was (by nature of being deficient) until the development of YUM reached some maturity and thats in all practicality the only advantage Debian's packaging system has. The RHN method of distributing packages actually works quite well for RHEL and used to work well for RHL... by open sourcing it the code CAN support more systems than just RH so all people need to do is take advantage of the code and make it support their systems (why should Red Hat do that for them?). What RHN provides is not just a neat way to download and install packages on the machine (apt is nothing more), but an admin-level view of the machines being maintained and a way to coordinate that update process smartly. I'm aware of nothing but makeshift scripts that would do this for Debian on an enterprise scale.

[gtewallace]

"I'm aware of nothing but makeshift scripts that would do this for Debian on an enterprise scale."

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